GMO Introduces Bitcoin Salary Payment System

Japanese Internet leader GMO Group has announced that its employees can start receiving part of their salaries in bitcoin beginning in February of next year for the March pay period. This option will initially only be available to employees of GMO Internet Co. Ltd but it will gradually extend to the entire group, the company detailed in its announcement on Monday. According to the company’s website, GMO Internet has 4,710 full-time employees as of September this year.

The company also listed 42 subsidiaries on its website which are part of the GMO Group. They include GMO Coin, the company’s cryptocurrency subsidiary, and GMO Click, one of the world’s largest FX platforms.

In order to facilitate salary payments in bitcoin, the company explained:

The GMO Internet Group has decided to introduce a system that allows part of the salary payment to be received as bitcoin in order to promote ownership of our domestic employees’ virtual currency.

The minimum bitcoin payment will initially be 10,000 yen (~$88) and the upper limit will be 100,000 yen (~$881). Each salary payment in yen will be reduced by the amount of bitcoin payment paid, using the exchange rate at the GMO Coin exchange. Employees who create an account at the GMO Coin exchange “can receive bitcoin on the same day as their payday,” Nikkei described.

GMO Promoting Crypto From Within

Following the launch of its cryptocurrency trading platform in May, GMO announced in September its plans to begin a mining business. The company plans to spend 10 billion yen in the next few years to build a mining farm as well as to research and develop 7nm, 5nm, and 3.5nm mining chips. In October, GMO announced that it plans to sell mining boards equipped with 7nm chips using token sales.

In Monday’s announcement, the company stated, “The mining business is currently preparing for the start of business beginning in January 2018.”

“The GMO Internet Group will contribute to the development of virtual currencies in the world by promoting efforts related to virtual currency throughout the group,” the company noted, adding that:

In order to further strengthen these approaches to virtual currency, it is important for employees to actively use virtual currency first by improving [their] virtual currency literacy.

What do you think of GMO offering to pay their employees in bitcoin? Let us know in the comments section below.

A student of Austrian Economics, Kevin found Bitcoin in 2011 and has been an evangelist ever since. His interests lie in Bitcoin security, open-source systems, network effects and the intersection between economics and cryptography.

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